Five Famous April Fools' Day Jokes
Image Source: CultureSlate
Well, it’s that time of year again, the day when seemingly every respectable news site gives completely false information, presents it as fact, and sees if they can convince you it's real, or just have a laugh. I am of course talking about April Fools' Day, and we already have a prank or two up our sleeves. However, rather than having all our articles be pranks today, we figured that we could have one talking about other pranks that have been held on this day. From the silly to the surprisingly serious, here is a list, in no particular order, of five well-known April Fool's Day pranks.
5. Yoshi, The False Pokémon
Image Source: Wikipedia
Two of Nintendo’s franchises collided in this hoax. The April 1999 edition of Expert Gamer magazine claimed that you could evolve the Pokémon Dragonite into the Mario character Yoshi. Through a convoluted method, trading a Dratini from Pokémon Red to Blue, evolving it all the way, trading it back, completing the game and Pokédex, going to where Mew is found, and giving Dragonite a Fire Stone, the Dragon-type would evolve into the green dinosaur. This was, of course, just a prank, and no evolution method would ever be that convoluted in any game, but some people bought it all the same.
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4. Spaghetti Trees? The Beeb Pulls A Prank
Image Source: Wikipedia
Everyone knows Spaghetti doesn’t grow on trees, but even the BBC wasn’t above a practical joke. In a 1957 episode of Panorama, the British broadcaster stated that the pasta was grown on trees, with the warm winter making for an especially large crop in Switzerland. The relative scarcity of spaghetti at the time, coupled with the assistance of respected news announcer Richard Dimbleby, meant that some people bought the story. Let’s hope they didn’t try planting their spaghetti.
3. Taco Bell Bought The Liberty Bell
Image Source: The Museum of Hoaxes
This one goes to a different place. Fast food chain Taco Bell announced on April 1, 1996, that they had purchased the Liberty Bell to help repay the national debt. Now called the Taco Liberty Bell, it was supposed to spend its time between Philadelphia and the Taco Bell headquarters in Irvine, California. This was obviously just a hoax, but it was fitting for Taco Bell to claim they got “the crown jewel of Bells.” Besides, someone can look at this as a satire of nationalization.
2. Adult Swim’s Bait And Switch
Image Source: Game Detective Wiki
Adult Swim, the nighttime block of Cartoon Network, is well known for its April Fools' Day broadcasts, which itself became the subject of its own joke. On April 1, 2016, Adult Swim ran advertisements recapping their then 12-year history of pranks, and hyping up that year's pranks. This makes it perhaps unsurprising when, at midnight, nothing happened. They relied on their history to subvert expectations and made the lack of a prank a prank in and of itself. For that, we respect them
1. Google Jokes And Hoax
Image Source: UX Collective
The search engine Google has been known for its April Fools' Day pranks, which lasted from the 90’s until 2020. With many options to choose from, we decided to tackle the 2014 Google Maps Pokémon Challenge. This prank saw Google Maps launch a fake competition where users would be able to seek out the creatures in the real world. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it’s believed to be the inspiration behind the Augmented Reality game Pokémon GO, which became a huge hit on launch. It seems that some pranks have been known to become real, and that is why we chose it to end the list.
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